Data portal manual

1 Background

Journal articles in peer-reviewed journals remain the main mechanism to communicate scientific findings. In such papers, data is organized in figures that together comprise a narrative. However, due to space limitations and focus, not all insights from biomedical analysis can be captured in a few figures and a single manuscript. To capture more value from biomedical datasets, the original data when shared with the scientific community for re-analysis. Doing so can lead to novel insights that were not captured in the original research paper.

2What is a Unicle data portal?

A Unicle data portal makes scientific data available through an easy-to-use interface. Users are able to access their data via the data portal, to interactively explore and visualize the data, and to download it as images or tables. The data portal abstracts away coding required to visualize and explore data which allows users to efficiently focus on deriving new insights. All figures and tables produced in the data portal can be custom-tailored to the users house style for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The data portals allow scientists across the world to publish and share scientific biomedical data. 

3 Data portal structure

The data portal is structured in such a way that it systematically builds the story of your data:

1. Project storyline - tells the overall story of your data study and outlines the paper in terms of research questions and hypothesis that are being answered. Here you will also have a high-level outline of the tracks (e.g. corrensponding to figures 1-8 of a paper).
2. Track - is a chapter of the storyline (e.g. test hypothesis 1 of 5). It is a collection of individual analyses / plots or images supporting the chapter of the story.
3. Track element - individual analysis / plot / image building towards the argumentation of the chapter. Interactive plots are visually customizable with concise analysis and concluding text fields.

4Navigating a data portal

When entering the data portal, you will first the an overview of all the tracks in the project storyline. Clicking the "Open" button on track will allow you to open it and have an overview all the plots inside. Here you can select a plot of interest by clicking the "Select" button.

This will enlarge the plot allowing you to examine it more closely and will display the plot description. Clicking the "View interactively" button of interactive plots will open the interactive plot page.

Here you will be free to explore the interactive plot and customize the visualization to highlight the results that are of interest for you. The interactive plot is displayed on the left side while on the right you can find the various visualization settings.

At any point in time you can return to previous locations of the data portals by navigating via the breadcrumbs.